Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. On a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, groups of black-clad Muslim women relaxed on the green baize lawn among the in-line skaters and badminton players.

Their appearance, like little else, has unnerved other Britons, testing the limits of tolerance here and fueling the debate over the role of Muslims in British life ...

David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been “too deferential.”

“It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,” Mr. Sexton wrote. “It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.” ...

Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.

“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” ...

Author Mary Grabar was the daughter of traditional Eastern European immigrants who believed in repressing females as a matter of course. But she was able to leave that constraint behind and grow into a free individual because she attended an American school ...

In this piece, she notes with alarm the quiet invasion of misogynous Muslims into her community. She sees a little girl in traditional Islamic dress, and fears that today’s classroom will not provide that child with the liberation that schools of Grabar’s time allowed:

"One afternoon, deep in the poetic reverie the lake and trees and birds inspire, I came across a sight spooky against this natural sunny backdrop: a woman completely swathed in black with only slits for her eyes. The incongruous sight of women, peering out of slits of cloth, in full Islamic regalia, behind the wheels of minivans or paying for goat meat at the Publix is no longer that unusual in my neighborhood, though it still takes me aback. But here on a sunny afternoon, amidst ducks and geese, and gazebos and picnic tables, came this creature who looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past with two small children: the boy around four years old dressed in typical Western clothing of pants and a shirt. The girl, about age seven, wore the traditional headscarf and long dress.

... particularly for those who do not speak the language, facial expressions convey meaning and indicate good will and friendship. I was so used to greeting everyone I passed around the lake with a smile and a hello that in this context the isolation of this woman glared. For all their Simone de Beauvoir-inspired academic talk and analysis about the "gaze," feminists cannot see this blatant disregard for the connection of the woman, particularly the woman who cannot speak the language, with the outside world. Not even able to feel the sun on her skin, the woman was cut off from the human community, encased in a shroud ...

But as I remember the little girl in her headscarf in 2007 I see no such future for her. Indeed it is becoming more common to see college women wearing the traditional scarves, sometimes with blue jeans ... Marie Claire promoted such attire as adapted by designers. The hijab is chic ...

Given the messages of "coexistence," and the dogma of multiculturalism that pervades our educational system, the little girl in the scarf will have nowhere to turn for an alternative to her seventh-century culture ...

Little do the multiculturalists care about the little girl who will become like her mother, walking in a prison of black cloth, isolated, without identity, not even able to feel the sun. But they are the same ones, the ones who so detest their own culture, that they are blind to the barbarism in our midst. It may be too late for the woman swathed in black, but we need to reach her daughter."

Brenda Walker at VDARE comments ...

Am I the only woman who thinks that welcoming millions of these seventh-century misogynous cretins via immigration is as dumb as it gets?

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.

'Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.' ...

The construction of one of Europe's biggest mosques near to a globally famous Christian landmark has sparked a furious row in Germany.

Immigration and integration are hugely sensitive questions in Germany, which is home to a Turkish community of several million. But almost within the shadow of Cologne Cathedral, political correctness has now been replaced by bitter confrontation as the city's Muslims begin to build a 2,000-capacity mosque with twin minarets that will reach 170ft ...

"It's not a popular plan," said Joerg Uckermann, the district's deputy mayor. "We don't want to build a Turkish ghetto in Ehrenfeld. I know about Londonistan and I don't want that here."

Mr Uckermann is part of a curious coalition of protest that has united Jewish intellectuals and neo-Nazis. Leading the charge is Ralph Giordano, a prominent Jewish author, who wrote recently that Germany was witnessing a "clash of two completely different cultures" and questioned whether they could ever be reconciled.

Stating that he had received death threats for his opinions, he added: "What kind of a state are we in that I can face a fatwa in Germany?" ...

You might think that a trauma like 9/11 would have prompted a major rethink of its immigration policies by the Bush administration. You would think wrong. While enforcement was tightened in certain concentrated areas, elsewhere it actually relaxed. Immigration from the Middle East reached an all-time peak in 2005. Altogether, an estimated 8 million people settled in the U.S. in the first six years of the Bush administration, at least half of them illegally. In 2004, 2006, and now again in 2007, the president has attempted to push through legalization and guest-worker programs.

Neither the president nor his inner circle has ever cared to hear from dissenters on this issue. A hasty and careless economic calculus, a poorly considered political gamble, and self-righteous moral grandstanding have together pushed the president to the worst domestic political and policy error of his presidency.

It seems impossible that the immigration bill can succeed: A large majority of the American people claim to be following the immigration debate closely, and that majority opposes the immigration plan by a three-to-one majority. And when the bill collapses, it will take what little remains of the president's political capital with it. Did I say capital? No, that has long since been spent. It is his credit that he is now exhausting.

Out of this disaster, however, comes some hope. The national debate triggered by the Senate's catastrophic reform has accelerated the great rethinking of immigration on the part of many millions of Americans. The backroom deal that produced this latest law epitomized decades of collusion between the two parties to suppress open discussion of this vital issue. This time, at last, the collusion failed. Democracy has erupted. I'm ready to make my voice heard. How about you?

Maryam Namazie speech, March 2007- seminar on Women’s Rights, the Veil and Islamic and religious laws in London

Quote:

"A ban on the burqa, chador, neqab and its likes is important but it is no where enough. The hijab or any conspicuous religious symbol must be banned from the state and education and relegated to the private sphere. This helps to ensure that government offices and officials from judges, to clerks, to doctors and nurses are not promoting their religious beliefs and are instead doing their jobs."

Click image to watch google video ...

My Thoughts ...

It's good, but not enough. Turkey already has these bans, but the headscarf and veils are spreading unchecked throughout the general population - reinforcing the reislamisation of Turkey. The headscarf is: visible Islam, reinforced Islam, empowered Islam, advertised Islam, hypnotic Islam, fashionable Islam, public Islam, marching Islam, conquering Islam, territorial Islam ... all of which, coupled with explosive Muslim birthrates, amounts to an unstoppable culture of Islam.

If Islam can be integrated into Australia, which is questionable, the headscarf and all religious dress will have to go. Invisible Islam, or no Islam.

PS - I heard on Jim Ball radio last night a couple, aged 60ish, was assaulted by 10 or 20 youths in a carpark of a Bankstown shopping centre. The couple verballed the occupants of a four wheel drive, driven by a woman in a white headscarf, who had rudely driven into a parking spot they were waiting to enter. A mob then bashed the couple, whilst the woman in the four-wheel drive smirked.

An Iranian human rights activist living in Germany has formed a "Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany" with 40 others and has received anonymous death threats after declaring she wants to help people to leave the religion if they so desire.

Iranian-born Mina Ahadi, 50, said she set up the group to highlight the difficulties of renouncing the Islamic faith which she believes to be misogynist. She wants the group to form a counterweight to Muslim organisations that she says don't adequately represent Germany's secular-minded Muslim immigrants ...

Ahadi: I haven't been a Muslim for 30 years. I'm also critical of Islam in Germany and of the way the German government deals with the issue of Islam. Many Muslim organisations like the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) or Milli Görüs engage in politics or interfere in people's everyday lives. They were invited to the conference on Islam (hosted by the government in Berlin last year). But their aims are hostile to women and to people in general."

SPIEGEL: Why?

Ahadi: They want to force women to wear the headscarf. They promote a climate in which girls aren't allowed to have boyfriends or go to discos and in which homosexuality is demonized. I know Islam and for me it means death and pain ...

SPIEGEL: Won't your campaign just harden the battle lines?

Ahadi: I don't think it's possible to modernize Islam. We want to form a counterweight to the Muslim organisations. The fact that we're doing this under police protection shows how necessary our initiative is.

From M & C ...

The ex-Muslims in Berlin contest the right of faith-centred groups to speak on behalf of an estimated 3 million to 3.5 million people of Islamic origin in Germany's 82-million-strong population.

They unveiled a poster with the slogan, 'We've Given It Up,' showing the faces of many former Muslims who no longer believe. The 'coming-out' flies in the face of Islam, which does not make any provision for formally departing from membership in the faith.

Toker, a journalist who was born in 1952 in Turkey's eastern Anatolia region, is radical in her criticism of Islam. She does not accept its Sharia system of rules at all, saying they contradict both human rights and the values of the German constitution.

She added that Islam was anti-woman.

'It humiliates women and turns them into servants of the men,' she said, adding the Islam was anti-man as well.

'It reduces men to breeding animals controlled by their urges,' said Toker. She quoted the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: 'He said, God is dead. One can live fine by taking one's own responsibility.'

She said she did not distinguish between Islam and fundamentalism.

'Islam is inherently radical,' she said.

Ahadi described her life to reporters and said, 'Political Islam has afflicted my life.' Born in Iran in 1956, her support for human rights had rapidly put her in opposition to the Islamic Revolution. She refused to wear a headscarf and was expelled from university.

Later her husband was executed. She had lived in Germany since 1996.

'I know all about political Islam,' she said. 'It ends up with us being stoned to death, even here in Germany.' ...

"Ex-Muslims" hoping to change the terms of debate about Islam in Europe will launch a British group in London on Thursday.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain will be the latest addition to groupings that began in Germany in February and spread to Scandinavia in May. A Dutch group will hold its launch in September.

The activists, many of them Iranian exiles, support the freedom to criticize religion and the end to what they call "religious intimidation and threats".

"Too many things in the media and government policies have been geared to pandering to the political Islamic movements and Islamic organizations," Maryam Namazie, head of the British group, told Reuters by telephone from London on Wednesday ...

There are more than 15 million people of Muslim origin in western Europe, mostly in France, Germany and Britain. Spokesmen for Muslims are often religious leaders, some more conservative theologically or active politically than the silent majority ...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger told a gathering of Hispanic journalists that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly.

"You've got to turn off the Spanish television set" and avoid Spanish-language television, books and newspapers ...

"You're just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster," Schwarzenegger said.

"I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say, and I'm going to get myself in trouble," he said, noting that he rarely spoke German and was forced to learn English when he emigrated from Austria.

Schwarzenegger was responding to a question about how Hispanic students can improve academically. Many journalists for Spanish-language organizations in the audience were surprised by the remarks.

After the first World War, immigration to the United States was drastically cut back, and it stayed cut back for about 25 years until after World War II. You might call it the Grand Pause after the previous 45 or 50 years during which immigrants poured into the country by the millions ...

The Grand Pause brought with it beneficial effects no one foresaw. It gave the nation a chance to digest the huge new addition to the population it had already received and it gave the millions who had arrived during the previous half century the time to assimilate.

... we might wish to ask ourselves whether the time for welcoming vast numbers of new people may have passed.

Merely raising such a possibility brings on shouts of protest—America is a nation of immigrants and my parents came through Ellis Island and so forth and so on. We hear this speech given as though it follows that what was done in the past is what ought to be done in the future.

This is not the 19th century nor the early decades of the 20th, when huge populations conferred power on a nation. In the 21st century, large populations are a drag. Population growth is a burden.

The idea of growth has been so hammered into our heads that the thought of a no-growth prosperity is inconceivable. Make the pie bigger and we each will get more. It has not occurred to us that another way to get more is to have the same size pie but fewer people demanding a slice ...

Closing down immigration for a generation will create many problems for which we have no immediate answers. New thinking will be demanded and new thinking is what we must do, because the compromise immigration bill is a continuation of thoughtless growth that will lead us first to a bigger mess than we have now, then to a nightmare and finally to disaster.

Lawrence Auster's comments ...

While von Hoffman correctly points out that the purpose of the 1924 Act was not to have a pause in immigration to help immigrants assimilate, he diplomatically remains silent on what the actual purpose of the Act was: to maintain the then existing ethnic composition of the U.S. ... The fact that a liberal writer like von Hoffman is using the 1924 Act as his model for us to follow today, even if on the basis of a somewhat different rationale, indicates--as I said of Peggy Noonan's recent call for an immigration moratorium--a revolution in consciousness.

A reader who writes on immigration and culture replies:

... we are losing our culture and identity. Previous conventional wisdom was that the immigrants are assimilating just as in past, that the great American economy assimilates everyone etc. Don't downgrade the contributions of you and me and others who have tried to point out how it's NOT working this time.

You know what I think is the American mood right now on immigration? ...

We're against gushing borders and illegal immigration, which is at this point even souring the general mood on legal immigration, because we don't trust our bureaucrats to let in the people America needs. We don't trust our bureaucrats and leaders to care a lot about America ...

We're asking for closed borders and pulling for newcomers ...

We should stop putting newcomers in constant jeopardy by blithely importing ever-newer immigrants who'll work for ever lower wages. The ones here will never get a sure foot on the next rung that way.

We should close the border, pause, absorb what we have, and set ourselves to "patriating" the newcomers who are here ...

Having no borders--that's radical ...

Leaving your country wide open in the age of terror is radical ...

Lawrence Auster's comments ...

The intensified opposition to illegal immigration sparked by President Bush's mad open-borders scheme is evolving into opposition to legal immigration itself ...

That America's own Songstress of the Open Border would speak this way signals a revolution in consciousness.

... to show peacefully that the Turkish people are not supporting current Islamic AKP government's non-secular practices or a president with such background. Estimates on the number of participants vary between 300,000 and one million, but everybody agrees that it was the biggest such demonstration ever held in Ankara ... Turkish media however widely ignored this event not to upset the government. This alone proves people's worries about the Islamic AKP government, and the weak and dependent (quite disgusting) structure of the Turkish media:

The story of MerveKavakci, an elected Turkish politician, thrown out of parliament in 1999 for wearing a headscarf (banned for federal employees) and subsequently stripped of her citizenship 11 days later. Now living in the USA:

Two weeks after the Ankara Meeting was held to protest the Islamic AKP government and its non-secular practices, Turks gathered in Istanbul on April 29, 2007 to renew their iron-clad commitment to the secular republic and democracy established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder and the first President of modern Turkey ... literally millions attended the meeting, which was most likely the largest such event in Turkish history.

Hundreds of thousands of pro-secular Turks gathered in the third largest city of Turkey Sunday to protest against the Islamist-rooted government that they fear is working to raise the influence of religion on society and pressure the secularist center-left parties unite ahead of parliamentary elections set for July 22. Organizers of the pro-secular rally estimated the participating crowd at around two million.

This video is pro-Muslim, but it gives more background to the Islamification of Turkey, and illustrates the difficulty of containing Islam in a reformed state. A lesson for western countries headed down the same road:

DENIZLI, Turkey: The little red prayer book was handed out in a public primary school here in western Turkey earlier this month. It was small enough to fit in a pocket, but it carried a big message: Pray in the Muslim way. Get others to pray, too.

"The message was clear to me," said a retired civil servant, whose 13-year-old son, a student at the Yesilkoy Ibrahim Cengiz school, received the book. "This is not something that should be distributed in schools."

This leafy, liberal city would seem like one of the least likely places to allow Islam to permeate public life. But for some residents, the book is part of a subtle shift toward increasingly public religiosity that has gone hand-in-hand with the ascent of the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ...

The party has not ordered changes, but sets examples through a growing network of observant teachers and public servants who have been hired since it came to power in 2002.

... secular residents say that they see changes, and that they are the inevitable outcome of several decades of economic transformation. "In a very quiet, deep way, you can sense an Islamization," said Bedrettin Usanmaz, a jewelry shop owner in Denizli. "They're not after rapid change. They're investing for 50 years ahead."

At the heart of the issue is a debate about the fundamental nature of Islam and its role in the building of an equitable society.

... secular Turks argue that Islam will always seek more space in people's lives, and therefore should be reined in. They look to the military as secularism's final defender.

"Islam is not like other religions," said Kadim Yildirim, a history teacher in Denizli from an opposition labor union. "It influences every part of your life, even your bedroom."

Yildirim is part of a number of concerned teachers who say that the new teachers hired in recent years, often from conservative backgrounds, are adding up to a change in the education system.

Last month, the Education Ministry relaxed requirements for appointing new school principals.

... 836 people from the government's Religious Affairs Directorate have been transferred to the ministry's offices during Erdogan's tenure. That has also led to lifestyle changes in the bureaucracy: In Denizli, during the month of fasting in Ramadan, the lunchroom in the Ministry of Education no longer serves food, in an assumption that all workers are religious, employees said ...

"They are coming to power, and it scares the hell out of the established elite," said Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University. The two groups "have nothing in common," he said ...

One of the country's primary eighth-grade science books, for example, "Science Knowledge," has lost its detailed description of Darwin's theory of natural selection, and gained a reference to a theory that holds that living beings did not evolve but came into being exactly as they are today ...

All education material, once vetted centrally, is now checked in a far looser fashion ... The red prayer book, illustrated with pictures of small children praying, would probably not have been distributed in past years ...

Last year more than 155,000 Germans emigrated from their native country. Since 2004 the number of ethnic Germans who leave each year is greater than the number of immigrants moving in. While the emigrants are highly motivated and well educated, "those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated," ...

In a survey conducted in 2005 among German university students, 52 percent said they would rather leave their native country than remain there. By "voting with their feet," young, educated Germans affirm that Germany has no future to offer them and their children. As one couple who moved to the United States told the newspaper Die Welt: "Here our children have a future in which they will not have to fear unemployment and social decline." There are two main reasons why so-called "ethno-Germans" emigrate. Some complain that the tax rates in Germany are so high that it is no longer worthwhile working for a living there. Others indicate they no longer feel at home in a country whose cultural appearance is changing dramatically.

The situation is similar in other countries in Western Europe. Since 2003, emigration has exceeded immigration to the Netherlands. In 2006, the Dutch saw more than 130,000 compatriots leave. The rise in Dutch emigration peaked after the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. This indicates that the flight from Europe is related to a loss of confidence in the future of nations which have taken in the Trojan horse of Islamism, but which, unlike the Trojans, lack the guts to fight.

Elsewhere in Western Europe immigration currently still surpasses emigration, though emigration figures are rising fast. In Belgium the number of emigrants surged by 15 percent in the past years. In Sweden, 50,000 people packed their bags last year -- a rise of 18 percent compared to the previous year and the highest number of Swedes leaving since 1892. In the United Kingdom, almost 200,000 British citizens move out every year.

Last September Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher and author of several scholarly books, published an opinion piece in Le Figaro entitled "What should the free world do in the face of Islamist intimidation?"

His piece concluded that while Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimise violence, Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred ...

Redeker and his family went into hiding. Five months later they are still living in secrecy ..

To judge from this response, large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to the hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam, as opposed to Christianity or Judaism, freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

"How did France reach this point?"

The last time France was faced with a large-scale threat from something similar - fascism - it reacted with denial, defeat and accommodation. Parallels are drawn by an American writer living in Europe, Bruce Bawer, whose book While Europe Slept describes rapidly growing Muslim enclaves across Western Europe in which women are oppressed, homosexuals are persecuted, infidels are threatened, Jews are demonised, "honour" killings are frequent, forced marriages are routine, and freedom of speech and religion are repudiated. European political and media establishments turn a blind eye to this in the name of an illusory multicultural harmony.

"Europe's media, when confronted with events or statements that vividly illuminate the goals of Muslim leaders and agitators, either don't report on them or edit out key facts," Bawer wrote recently on his website. "Few media accounts of the 2005 Paris riots, for example, mentioned participants' cries of 'Allahu Akbar' ...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali ... "There is a combination of imperial guilt, and the civil rights movement," she said. "It created an attitude that all cultures are equal, that Western culture is not superior, that Christianity is not superior. This is especially so in the intellectual elite, the media, the education systems, in politics. But for the intellectual elite this belief is only theoretical.

"It is the working-class communities who were the first to experience the realities of immigration and cultural differences. When there were the first protests in these communities about problems with immigration, and about problems with how immigrant women were being treated, the elite immediately turned on them by calling them 'racists' ...

Faced with the rising tide of bomb attacks, plots, threats, demands and belligerent victimology from a violent, ignorant and sexually repressive subculture, the centre of European civilisation appears to be doing exactly what it did the last time blackshirts were on the march in Europe - appeasing, denying and capitulating.

WASHINGTON - The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.

Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.

“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.

“In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,” she said of the measure.

... the legislation sparked a furious rebellion among many Republican and even some Democratic voters, who were linked by the Internet and encouraged by radio talk show hosts. Their outrage and activism surged to full force after Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who was an author of the bill, suggested early this week that support for the measure seemed to be growing. The assault on lawmakers in Washington was relentless ...

“Technologically enhanced grass-roots activism is what turned this around, people empowered by the Internet and talk radio,” said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group ...

For Mrs. Thibodeaux and others on her side, the immigration debate was a battle for the soul of the nation because it seemed to divert taxpayer-financed resources to cater to foreigners who had not come to this country by legal means.

“This hit home with me because I knew it was taking away from our people,” said Mrs. Thibodeaux, 50, who works at Ruehle’s Auto Transport. “What happened to taking care of our own people first?”

Rosemary Jenks, a policy advocate at NumbersUSA, which calls for curbing immigration, said that 7,000 new members signed up for the organization in a single day last week. Other groups reported a similar outpouring as proponents of the Senate bill claimed to be gaining momentum.

“We had way more response than we could handle,” said Stephen Elliott, president of Grassfire.org, a conservative Internet group that called for volunteers for a petition drive and instructed people how to barrage lawmakers with telephone calls and e-mail.The group gathered more than 700,000 signatures on petitions opposing the bill, delivering them this week to senators in Washington and in their home states ...

Opposition to the Senate bill brought together many Americans in states where immigration was not traditionally a fervor-inspiring issue, but where illegal immigration has become more visible in recent years.

“Every state is now a border state,” said Susan Tully, the national field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has long supported a crackdown on illegal immigration ...

“Ordinary people like me rose up and put a stop to it,” said William Murphy, a retired policeman from Evansville, Wis., one of the Grassfire.org volunteers who delivered petitions to his senators. On Thursday before the vote, he said, he put in new calls to 15 senators. Mr. Murphy said he felt strongly about the bill because he believed it would degrade the value of American citizenship.

“If I come from Mexico, I can jump the fence and get all those American benefits,” he said. “It’s outrageous when you can buy your citizenship for $5,000,” he said, referring to the fines that illegal immigrants would pay under the bill to become legal permanent residents.

When asked about Mr. Bush’s support for the bill, Mr. Murphy, a longtime Republican, had to pause to temper his words.

“I was stunned, really,” he said. Mr. Bush “has always been a person who stood for some basic human values, and now he’s going to give away the country?” ...

Here in Michigan, speaking at her neatly maintained home under hickory trees in Washington, a town north of Detroit that has been battered by auto company layoffs, Mrs. Thibodeaux said the immigration bill worried her like no other political issue. She believed it would reward undeserving immigrants who do not speak English and would soon become a burden on public services that Americans need in a time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of our American people in Detroit are hurting,” Mrs. Thibodeaux said, noting that she has often done volunteer work in poor neighborhoods here. “It’s just not right.”

Her strong feelings about the immigration issue came gradually, she said. A nephew who works as a house painter had trouble finding high-paying work because of competition from illegal immigrants. Some Mexican teenagers hassled her on the street, seeming to mock her because she walks with a cane. She spotted immigrants shopping with food stamps at the grocery store ...

If the immigration issue comes before Congress again, she said, “I’m going to get a microphone and start yelling.”